How to Breathe New Life Into a Dying Website
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009Do you have a website that is losing income and traffic? Perhaps Google did a little algorithm change that caused the site to lose ranking and therefore visitors, or perhaps it is pure neglect.
Don’t worry – it can happen to the best of us! We get busy and distracted if we have multiple projects or sites, and it’s hard to keep all those plates spinning. If this ever happens to you, don’t worry too much. You can turn things around rather quickly, especially if the site in question is already well established. Here are some of the things you can do to breathe new life into a dead website.
Launch a blog on the domain
If you haven’t heard already, search engines love blogs. The frequently updated content is interesting to human visitors, too. Have a blog installed on the domain and start blogging with regularity. If you can do so, throw a little money at the problem and hire a ghostwriter to write quick blog posts for you. This is more cost effective than hiring writers to create entire articles. You can send the ghostwriters lists of keywords to write about so they can quickly come up with content. Of course, doing some keyword research first is a good idea. Once your ghostwriters send you their work, you can then expand on what they wrote. This will enable you to add a lot of content to the blog very quickly.
Write new articles
Write several new articles to direct traffic to the site. You can use some of the ghostwritten content you used for the blog posts if you like. Then, submit these to article directories for distribution. Where appropriate, publish the articles on another site you own. You can also write different versions of the article for use as guest blog posts for others.
Get more incoming links quickly
You can do this in a number of ways. You can pay for incoming links. Contact people who have websites in your niche and offer to pay them for text links. This can be fairly inexpensive. Writing articles will also get you more links. It also helps to go through your site and make sure your site has good internal navigation, meaning your pages are linked to other appropriate pages inside the site itself.
Use Google alerts
Sign up for Google alerts in the keywords you want to rank for for this particular site. This accomplishes a couple of things. Each day you are sent an email telling you where bloggers are talking about this keyword phrase, so you can check out their blog and leave a comment if you can add something useful to the conversation, linking to your site. You also get ideas for new topics because you can see what is going on in the news in your niche.
After adding a new page to the site, tell your Twitter followers about it. If you have a particular page you really want to send traffic to, ask your friends to Retweet your update.
I have a confession to make. I recently had the experience I talked about above – letting one of my highest earning sites go neglected. I am pleased to say that after applying the suggestions above, the traffic in the first month increased by 80%, with a corresponding increase in income too. Of course, these very same tips would work not only to resurrect a dying site, but also for growing traffic to an established site or a brand new one!
Carrie Lauth is a work at home mom who created the Natural Mom Business Guide http://naturalmombusinessguide.com – the internet’s only complete how to tutorial for women who want to start an online business marketing to green minded families. She also offers coaching for those who need one-on-one assistance. http://carrielauth.com/hire-carrie.htm
